For at last the other side had come to its senses; Sir
Winterton was affable again, Lady Mildmay was canvassing, and Mr. Smiley
had high hopes. Despondency would have fallen on Foster's spirit but for
the report of Quisante's exploits, performed in the teeth of the orders
of that same Dr. Tillman who had given Sir Winterton such excellent
unprofessional advice touching the affair of Tom Sinnett. He gave
Quisante just as good counsel, and with just as little result. Then he
tried Quisante's wife and found in her what he thought a hardness or an
insensibility, or, if that were an unjust view, a sort of fatalism which
forbade her to seek to interfere, and reduced her to being a spectator of
her husband's doings and destiny rather than a partner in them.
"How can he lie by now?" she asked. "It's impossible; he must see this
out whatever happens." Quisante had said exactly the same thing, but his
wife's perfect agreement in it seemed strange to the doctor. It was
making the man's success more than the man; there was too much of the
Spartan wife about it, without the Spartan wife's excuse of patriotism.
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